This disclosure is based upon French Application No. 00/14560, filed on Nov. 13, 2000 and International Application No. PCT/FR01/03418, filed Nov. 6, 2001, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
The field of the invention is that of the manufacture of intelligent portable objects such as smart cards, and more especially that of their personalisation.
Mention should be made in this field of the document EP-A-0513885. It proposes the quasi-simultaneous electrical reading and/or writing of information: it therefore concerns electrical personalisation. Magnetic and printed recordings are made on a mobile assembly, by movements across the width of the card.
The Gemplus document U.S. Pat. No. 5,426,283 describes a graphical personalisation which is performed either before or after the electrical personalisation.
The document U.S. Pat. No. 5,198,652 describes the taking of a photograph with instantaneous development, the transfer of this photograph onto a card body and, with another apparatus, the programming of a circuit with information.
Mention should also be made of the Gemplus document FR-A-2790421 which describes equipment on which it is possible to apply the invention.
And the document DE-A-19641892 describes a programming installation with a revolving tray where a number of cards are programmed independently.
Normally, in the example of a smart card, the main steps of this manufacture are:
production on the one hand of a body of the object, here a plastic card body;
production on the other hand of an electronic circuit (memory and/or microprocessor);
insertion, that is to say assembly of the body and the circuit;
initialisation by writing, into the circuit, data specific to the application of this object; and then
personalisation by means of which the object is adapted to its bearer and which is performed on the one hand in the form of electrical writing and on the other hand in the form of graphical or embossed ornamentation.
Personalisation is therefore carried out successively first by electrical writing, and then the graphical personalisation is performed. This is because data coming from the electrical personalisation are often used to obtain, by interrogating a database for example, the graphical data corresponding to the object to be manufactured. The different steps of the electrical and graphical personalisation are depicted in FIG. 1. And the different elements making it possible to carry out these steps are depicted in FIG. 2. These figures are described in detail later.
It should be understood that the personalisation is carried out sequentially by two mechanical systems which can possibly be either two separate items of equipment (one per system), or one item of equipment uniting the two systems, each system having a reject bin for the cards having defects. Smart cards personalised electrically but not graphically are generally blank or printed with a generic pattern for all cards; they cannot be differentiated from one another, in particular by the operator responsible for the electrical and graphical personalisation. This results in a considerable risk of error or fraud when graphical personalisation is not carried out on a good card already electrically personalised.
This risk increases when the two items of personalisation equipment are in separate locations, the transfer from one item of equipment to the other then generally being provided manually by an operator.
Furthermore, the electrical personalisation equipment and the graphical personalisation equipment each have their own rate, indicated opposite the steps of FIG. 3. Overall, the rate of the electrical and graphical personalisation method is set by the greater rate.
The electrical personalisation time varies in particular as a function of the chip type and the application. As a guide, the average electrical personalisation time for a GSM mobile telephone chip is for example approximately 12 seconds. It is then necessary, in order to keep to a customary rate of 3600 cards per hour, that is one card per second, to increase the number of electrical personalisation heads: twelve (12) in the case of GSM smart cards.
In view of the above, it should be understood that one aim of the invention is to carry out the electrical and graphical personalisations in masked time, on a single item of equipment.
To that end, the objects of the invention are a method and an item of equipment for personalisation in which at least a part of each of the electrical personalization and the graphical personalization are performed simultaneously.
Electrical and graphical personalisation in the same location guarantees security of correlation of the electrical and graphical information and avoids frauds insofar as any attempt at card retrieval between the two operations does not allow the set of two operations to be completed.
The result of the simultaneity of the graphical and electrical personalisation is a gain in productivity: instead of the electrical personalisation time being added to the graphical personalisation time, the shorter time, whichever that is, is masked by the longer time. Personalisation in masked time is sometimes spoken of.
The invention also has the advantage of reducing the number of items of equipment used and the space occupied by them, since the two items of equipment for electrical personalisation and graphical personalisation are replaced by a single item of equipment.